Leading Workers to Lead Themselves: The External Leadership of Self- Managing Work Teams

We gratefully acknowledge the encouragement and support of Dr. Richard Cherry. This paper explores the paradoxical role of the external leaders of self-managing workteams. Observation, interviews, group elicitations, and a literature search were used to identify salient leader behaviors in a medium-sized manufacturing plant that had been operating for several years under a system of self-managing work teams. A selfmanagement leadership questionnaire was developed to measure the 21 leader behaviors identified. Correlations with overall leadership-effectiveness ratings generally indicated that the external leaders' most important behaviors are those that facilitate the team's self-management through self-observation, self-evaluation, and selfreinforcement. The study suggests that there is a legitimate role for external leaders of self-managing work teams but that it differs from traditional and participative leadership roles.